Date: 11 Nov 96 21:49:07 EST From: robert scheetz <76550.1064-AT-CompuServe.COM> Subject: M-I: sex-ism Recently Masterpiece Theatre ran a production of Arthur Miller's "Broken Glass." The fictional setting is '39 Brooklyn; the characters are a middle-aged middle-class jewish couple. At the beginning of the play the woman suffers an hysterical paralysis after reading the newspaper report on "kristal nacht". The action then consists in the unraveling the etiology of this hysteria...thru the mediation of a priapic Jewish doctor. The husband, pathetically insecure and commensurately abject, does weasel-work for a WASP owned realty firm, struggling to maintain the household in middle-class dignity. During the course of the play, he gets fired: on account of a racial stereotype and the insecurity/over-eagerness arising from his socio-economic circumstance. Simultaneously, the wife cum doctor are uncovering her hatred- for/fear-of her husband. She sees him (1) having denied her a preferred life as a "business woman" by getting her with child (and for the 20 yrs since has refused sexual affection), and (2) identical with the nazi brutes ( for breaking the glass of her virginity). The while, tho paralyzed, she aggressively lusts after the doctor. The husband vehemently resists the psychoanalytic approach...exposing his own self-loathing, and recognition that she wants him dead. He dies from an heart-attack and she gets out of her wheel-chair. Miller is clearly presenting his view of the contemporary "woman's issue". The working man, for all his tireless and selfless exertions, is thoroughly isolated and aleinated; despised and exploited by capital and even his own mate; ends in self-loathing and despair. She, on the other hand, focuses her considerable emotional strength into her factitious history of oppression, ...destroys and betrays him to consumate bourgeois aspirations. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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